How to Build a Ham Radio Shack

For many people, the term radio shack conjures visions more worthy of a mad scientist’s lab than of a modern ham station. Your radio shack, however, is simply the place you keep your radio and ham equipment. The days of bulbous vacuum tubes, jumping meters, and two-handed control knobs are in the distant past.

For some hams, the entire shack consists of a handheld radio or two. Other hams operate on the go in a vehicle. Cars make perfectly good shacks, but most hams have a spot somewhere at home that they claim for a ham radio.

Here’s what you can find in a ham shack:

The rig: The offspring of the separate receiver and transmitter of yore, the modern radio, or rig, combines both devices in a single compact package about the size of a large satellite TV receiver. Like its ancestors, the rig has a large tuning knob that controls the frequency, but state-of-the-art displays and computer screens replace the dials and meters.

Computer: Most hams today have at least one computer in the shack. Computers now control many radio functions, including keeping records of contacts. Digital data communications simply wouldn’t be possible without them. Some hams use more than one computer at a time.

Mobile/base rig: For operating through local repeater stations, hams may use a handheld radio, but in their shacks, they use a more-capable radio. These units, which are about the size of hardcover books, can be used as either mobile or base rigs.

Microphones, keys, and headphones: Depending on the shack owner’s preferences, you’ll see a couple (or more) of these important gadgets, the radio’s true user interface. Microphones and keys range from imposing and chrome-plated to miniaturized and hidden. The old Bakelite headphones, or cans, are also a distant memory, replaced by lightweight, comfortable, hi-fi designs.

Antennas: In the shack, you’ll find switches and controllers for antennas that live outside the shack. A ham shack tends to sprout antennas ranging from vertical whips the size of pencils to wire antennas stretched through the trees and supersize directional beam antennas held high in the air on steel towers.

Cables and feed lines: Look behind, around, or under any piece of shack equipment, and you find wires. Lots of them. The radio signals pipe through fat, round black cables called coaxial, or coax. Power is supplied by colored wires not terribly different in size from house wiring.

The modern ham shack is as far removed from the homebrewed breadboards in the backyard shed as a late-model sedan is from a Model T.

Where did the phrase radio shack come from? Back in the early days of radio, the equipment was highly experimental and all home-built, requiring a nearby workshop. In addition, the first transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves. The voltages were high, and the equipment was often somewhat a work in progress, so the radio hobbyists often found themselves banished from the house proper.

Thus, many early stations were built in a garage or tool shed. The term shack carries through today as a description of the state of order and cleanliness in many a ham’s lair.